


Starting Over

by DrGaybelGideon



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Frederick goes on holiday!, Frederick puts on his face, Frederick takes care of dogs, Frederick's haunted by Abel's ghost!, It's all here folks!, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 19:13:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4448816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrGaybelGideon/pseuds/DrGaybelGideon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Basically, a load of post-recovery Frederick drabbles, some crack, some horror, some ships, written on my Tumblr and now posted here. Can be read in order, can be individual, anything works!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Firearm Residue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frederick wakes up alone and confused in a hospital bed and decides he will not let the wound to his head win.

Frederick drifts.

It’s black when he opens his eyes.  
Black after he closes them again.

Frederick drifts.

There’s something grey, light behind something blocking his vision catching on his eyelashes on one eye.  
He can’t- it’s not moving, all of him isn’t moving, lying still.  
That’s probably a good thing.

Frederick drifts.

He’s in hospital.  
The light’s too cold bone-white for anywhere else, the smell of bleach too cloying in his nose.  
He can move his arms now: they’re too heavy, but he can lift them towards his face, pull the soft fabric of- bandages. Hospital.- away from where they’re blocking his nose.  
A nurse pulls his hand away, gently sliding a needle into the back of it.

Frederick drifts.

He’s not sore when he wakes. That’s a little strange.  
“Local anesthetic generally comes with fewer adverse effects than general anesthetic-” Abel Gideon smiles at him in his mind, or was it a lecturer from medical school? Maybe he’s losing his mind, how ironic.  
Abel definitely said something about meat, but meat’s edible, meat’s a thing to be cut apart - which makes a lot of sense now he’s bothered to remember the fact it was said to him, he maybe confused or repressed it before- but meat-  
Meat doesn’t have small cold metal poles sticking out of it. His face does.  
So he’s not meat anymore. That’s… not much of a relief.  
Frederick doesn’t dare touch it. Lies still and focuses on his hands, a dark purple blossom staining one from the nurse’s injection until another returns.

Frederick drifts.

Lying in bed’s going to waste his muscles, he decides rationally the next time his eyes- eye- returns back into focus. The contraption, the iron maiden cage that’s apparently been welded to the side of his face is probably going to be problematic enough without adding muscular atrophy to his ever-lengthening list of health issues.  
He’s careful about it to the point where his neck aches from the effort of steadying his head, terrified the contraption will catch on any of the many wires surrounding his head as he sits up. Clings to the blue safe fabric of the sheets he manages to pull under him as he stares down into the void between him and the steady floor, swinging his feet in preperation for the drop, a child paddling at the beach. If he falls and lands head first, he’s gone, the coldness of the spikes he’s surrounded by will enter his brain and he’ll be gone, probably resembling some form of overlarge porcupine roadkill from his resting place on the floor.  
He stumbles when he lands, ankles unused to bearing weight after god knows how long, and lets out a strangled cry muffled by the fact his jaw’s apparently wired shut as he grips the bed behind him hard enough to hurt.  
But he manages. Shuffles to the bathroom flat-footed and has his first independent piss in four weeks, a truly momentous event that a nurse happens to walk in on.  
He’s taken to a consultant not long after that, reassured of the pros and cons of the procedure they’ve chosen to fix his face by a balding man too trustworthy and smiling to remind him of any of his past surgical ‘friends’.

A needle in his arm and Frederick drifts again.

He’s not okay he’s not okay he’s hurt and he’s sore and his jaw is free and too small and his mouth tastes like blood and he’s dying he’s dying because as he thrashes his way to the bathroom there’s blood on his bandages they’ve done it wrong they’ve killed him he’s vomiting up tiny amounts of blood and too much water it’s coming from his eyes too, both of them, he can still cry from his bandaged eye apparently oh God he’s dying and they’re not putting him under again he’ll fight his way out of this he will hurt he will escape no no no no no

Frederick drifts tentatively off to sleep in his own bed three weeks later, new mattress and bedding paid for by the sum he was awarded for medical negligence after a nurse mistook an IV bag for a morphine line- he’s suing for emotional damages later- warm and thin and alive amongst emerald green sheets.

Frederick’s eye’s blue.  
He fixes that with the same money. Back to green. Good as new. Same as its owner.

Will Graham’s drifting when he brings a bouquet of flowers to him, wrapped in cream silk ribbon he nervously adjusts to distract himself from his surroundings.  
He can survive hospitals. He’s survived gunshots and vivisection and Hannibal Lecter- the reason he’s here in the first place- who will not survive his revenge intact.  
“Were you expecting someone else?” He pushes his purpose down with a curl of lips, waiting for Will to finish burbling before smiling a reply.


	2. A Small Moment Of Reflection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A quick drabble about Frederick's morning routine.

If anyone had told Frederick Chilton he’d be getting up at 6AM every morning to put in his teeth, fill a pothole in his face with liquid latex then apply a further four layers of tar-like foundation over the top of it, his past self would probably have sarcastically prayed for the bullet to alter its ‘miracle’ trajectory path.  
That’s a thought he tends to avoid, probably for its habit of making him stop and stare into the mirror at the scars on his stomach and chest.  
Debate.  
  
No.  
  
Teeth.  
His eye’s a little less inhuman now, hideous drooping of his face undone by the miracles of modern prosthetics.  
Appearance back to normal once his contact’s been tremblingly pushed onto the unseeing surface of his eye.  
He’s not scared of himself, it’s his body waking up a lot slower than his mind on these early mornings.  
  
Liquid latex.  
Hairdryer. Ignore the numb patches where heat doesn’t bother affecting his dead nerves.  
Coffee, which oddly enough stops his shaking hands.  
Getting there.  
  
First layer.  
Red lipstick, of all things, to cover the purple-black colour of the bullet wound.  
(Freddie Lounds of all people taught him that one, drunk enough in a bar to reveal a dark tattoo on her forearm.)  
Still a discomfortingly blood-like colour on that part of his face.  
  
Second layer.  
White face paint.  
White on red is far too gory looking, speeds his hands to apply the next layer.  
  
Third layer.  
A foundation slightly too dark for his skin, blending oddly on top of the white.  
It’s the same colour as his stomach scar, he smiles darkly.  
_Thank you very much Doctor Gideon for the colour chart._  
He’d thank him personally with a punch if his patient wasn’t dead and limbless, begrudgingly admit the scar’s a perfectly neat line now the trauma surrounding it’s died down a little.  
Funny how trauma paints the past in a rosier light.  
  
Fourth layer.  
The same colour as his surrounding skin, swept over his unscarred skin and checked religiously until his entire face is exactly the same shade.  
As good as new, aside from a slight lilt of voice caused by cheeks dragging over new teeth.  
  
A moment of reflection, both mental and physical.  
He can do this. He’s survived.  
Survived Hannibal and Gideon, a gunshot to the face.  
‘Cockroach’ is the word most often smirked at him by Matthew Brown now, a word that’s slowly losing a sting Frederick probably only imagined being there.  
He is a cockroach, small and underfoot and hideous, a strange twisted creature frightening by appearance to his peers.  
But necessary. Nessescary and needed, and determined to outlast everyone around him. Unkillable.  
‘Hannibal The Cannibal’, by The Unkillable Frederick Chilton, he smiles to himself. A ridiculous title. Completely unsellable.  
He’ll talk to his publisher later


	3. Therapy Pets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frederick dogsits a pack of animals that scare him until they don't.

Taking Will’s pack of strays home to help him reclaim his own property is a ridiculous idea, one which maintains an air of nobility for the five minutes it takes two bored dogs to savage a pair of leather loafers between them.

Their owner smirks unhelpfully by Frederick’s side, seemingly getting an alarming amount of pleasure watching his Louis Vuittons be torn apart and only bothering to intervene when Frederick’s horror leads him to grab his old cane.  
“Buster! Winston!” Will calls, and they listen, dropping them obediently before the larger more menacing one slinks over to its smirking owners’ side. The feeling the other man doesn’t like him is one Frederick returns in kind: if Will had been this openly unpleasant during his short stay in hospital, he wouldn’t have had a toilet seat for a month. The fact he can’t confiscate it now is almost as annoying as the six sets of eyes monitoring his every move, large and slightly hungry. No. He’s not scared of dogs, he’s survived Hannibal Lecter and vivisection. “Buster.” Will points to a small brown and white dog who lets out a shrill startling bark at the sound of his name.  “Winston.” Winston’s a golden- fetcher?- retriever, the large one who’s seemingly glued to Will’s side. “And the rest of the pack.”  
Their names aren’t revealed to him, so Frederick edgily decides to name them once he’s gone, locking them in his front room and deciding to deal with the logistics later.  
  
Will’s left money for food. Food is simple. Place bowls on the floor. Make sure each dog eats only his own share- “No, Buster!”- get his hands out of the way before they’re considered a tastier alternative to the brown sludge meat he’s instructed to feed them.  
Sleep is different. Sleep involves him getting over his fear of the sudden scrabbling noises sometimes heard from the faar door of his room and yelling at the culprit until they slink back off downstairs, calming his thrumming pulse and shaking off the adrenaline until he can sleep again. He’s very glad for his lack of neighbours at this point. On the plus side, they sleep on the picnic blankets his mother sends him most Christmases, poorly knitted things he’s never decided he’s low enough to take out in public. She appreciates the occasional photos he sends, glad they’re getting some use out of them as she checks up on him. He ignores her advice to walk them. He owns a large enough back garden that they can tire themselves out there, and take care of the issues of waste in the same sentence. Neat. Simple. Unlike the dogs themselves.  
Winston’s the most prominently annoying one for his tendencies to pine for Will and wonder off in a futile attempt to find his owner. Exactly like the man who adopted him, a small nasty part of Frederick remarks with a smile. Winston ignores him.  
Buster’s the equally horrific opposite and delights in fetching him things from the garden, sometimes designer pyjamas he’s hung out to dry, sometimes small dead things including, a particularly upsetting time, a still living rat. Frederick can’t tell which traumatic muddy offering being wagged at him upsets him more.  
The rest of the pack are fairly calm placid things. His favourite one to interact with- if interact with involves standing at a safe distance and smirking at the thing’s appearance- is the one he’s nicknamed Underbite Dog, too intimidated by the thing’s visible fangs to take its collar in hand and check. It’s an odd little thing, attempts to assert its dominance over the smaller dogs and even some of the larger ones, yapping at a nonplussed Winston a few times in a sight Frederick can’t help but let out something that sounds awfully like a giggle at. It reminds him of every- one in particular- short medical professional he’s ever met, making up for in aggression what it lacks in size. He can see why Pavlov experimented on dogs now, they’re not as dissimilar to people as he’d once have liked to have believe.  
  
One of the little idiots has gotten into his wine cellar, he realises with a dull clench of his remaining stomach a month or so later. He knows it’s a dog, the scrabbling claws are a bit of a giveaway. It doesn’t help him to stop bringing back unpleasant memories of the last scared creature in his cellar, not, that he imagines, his old patient suffered for very long.  
He can’t do it. Can’t go down there and free the trapped animal in case it is Gideon, his nightly nightmare somehow turned into his waking one and slithering across the floor towards him. His heartrate’s stupidly high at the thought, a ridiculous one, he’s obviously been watching too many horror films. But he still can’t do it.  
  
He almost falls down his cellar steps at the soundless appearance of a dog behind him, vicious string of curses cut off by his slightly angry amusement. It’s Underbite dog, large staring eyes given a gormless expression by the fact it can’t actually clench its jaws without displaying teeth almost causing him to let out a loud laugh in the echoing semi-darkness of the cellar mouth.  
“No.” The dog doesn’t respond, of course it doesn’t, just stares up at him still more intently as he shakes his head. “Your compatriot got itself down there, it can get itself back out again.” Frederick knows it can’t. It will have wandered in, smelt around a bit please say it can’t still smell him and managed to slam the door behind itself, locking itself in with Gideon’s ghost. As if on cue, there’s a loud miserable whine from the cellar, then more scrabbling. “No.” He’s pleading with it now, the stupid ball of fur that looks like it’s suffered a disastrous collision with a pan in the past and is still staring up at him expectantly, waiting for him to go down and fetch his pack member. “I-”  
He can. And he has to, otherwise the other dogs will wake and he’ll have to settle them again- he’d rather- and for heaven’s sake he’d hate to be trapped down there in the cold-  
It’s tentative, the first brush of soft fur under his fingertips before he picks up the surprisingly heavy lump and wrestles it under one arm. The dog doesn’t mind, it’s good like that, wriggles more into his side as he grips the rail with his other hand and distracts him from the realisation his cellar could still be covered in police tape, the dog could be tangled in it, he hasn’t ventured down to check since he moved back in.  
It’s Winston, the little shit, of course it’s Winston. The littler dog under his arm jumps down to join him, checking, as Frederick stares around his own small hell.  
It’s clean. Exactly the way he left it, wine bottles intact and in place, operating table gone along with the remains on it and blood soaked counters clean. A little faded smell of bleach the only reminder of the events- horrors- that took place here.  
Abel was gone when he got here, the thought’s upsetting and comforting, eyes staring off into some other place when he was found. He’s there now, Frederick decides. No lingering malice here. Just a plain old wine cellar, his wine cellar, safe. Winston breaks his concentration, nuzzling the hand that’s dangling by his side in a gesture of comfort that he needs. He’s emotional, a mixed cocktail of endorphins and feelings he can’t even begin to try and analyse, pets the little warmth under his hands for the reassurance it offers as a smaller head presses into his leg. An rude instruction to move it, go back upstairs where it’s warmer that he takes, grabbing a long forgotten bottle of Merlot and locking the cellar behind him, a horribly cathartic gesture he reassures himself is for the sake of his four legged companions.  
Four legged bed mates, it later turns out, when he drinks a little too much and falls asleep on the couch next to them, reassured by steady snuffling breathing and the weight of Buster curling up on his feet.  
  
As both a reward and a way to burn off his hangover, he takes the entire pack- well, more appropriately ‘is dragged by all six during’- their first proper walk the next day, feet sliding in mud in a way that feels like ice skating at the speed they’re pulling him along. He’s buying cheap shoes tomorrow if he survives this, he promises, physically falling over the top of Buster the second they stop. Jeans too, he adds, staring at the mud and now holes in the knees of his current pair. One licks his face, a wet tongue next to the wound accessible from his winded position on the floor, and Frederick freezes. Winston appears on the other side of his face, anxiously nuzzling his safe cheek- when did the dog decide to like him?- until he stands up, knocking a pinecone from under his feet, and in an unsurprising move Buster chases it.  
He spends an embarrassingly long time and gains an equally unflattering amount of joy watching six dogs scrambling over eachother to retrieve him a stick, and finally admits there might be a small grain of truth to the accusations he enjoys holding power a little too much as he retrieves it from Wi? with a pet.  
  
Frederick stares at himself after a pack accompanied run, plaid shirt covered in six different types of fur and better muscled forearms than he can remember having in an age, and wonders whether he can admit to himself he’s accidentally turned into a shorter, better haired Will Graham along the way.  
Not as good looking, obviously, and now he’s back, he really should have covered his scar, it’s still awful and-  
Underbite dog squints up at him from the floor of the full length mirror.  
Okay, he’s not that bad. And his body’s better, shoulders a little broader, forearms toned like-  
Like he’s been swinging an axe.  
The dogs appear, one by one, letting out small whines of concern after the fifth minute of him laughing at his own reflection in the mirror. At the right angle, with the right blank and surly facial expression, he looks like a slightly pudgier version of the ‘lumberjack fantasy’ he sometimes sees on cards.  
He should phone up Freddie or Alana, put on his face properly and ask if they’d like to help walk his dogs, or jog in public with them, hopefully get tangled up with a fellow dog walker, physically and emotionally. It worked for Will once, it could repeat itself. He doesn’t kick Buster out that night, because his closet’s locked. Doesn’t kick the other 6 out either, although he shuffles them off his feet when they cramp.  
He’ll smell of dogs for a week, but he can’t find it within him to care as the smallest shuffles under his arm.


	4. A Helping Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the only one of Hannibal's victims currently able to walk, Frederick decides he should offer himself as a crutch in hope of later payback.

Frederick‘s always thought he’d outgrown religion. Given it up like Santa and the easter bunny, a pleasant childhood memory he’d cast off like small dungarees and socks for a child’s feet.  
He’s appreciating elements of it more with age and trauma, and arrives at his own personal purgatory armed with flowery crosses to ward off the horror of John Hopkins hospital, a vampire that’s claimed far more than its fair share of his blood.  
  
He’s got a connection to Will Graham running the length of his abdomen which allows him to ignore the bitterness in what’s left of his stomach. The other man’s still good looking, a piece of driftwood who’s somehow managed to be sucked too far into Hanibal’s vortex and live to tell the tale with minimal scarring. Unfair.  
Will Graham is driftwood with still sharp edges. Perhaps he’s smug with himself, still views himself as the cleverest man in the room for rejecting Frederick’s flowers and offers of help. Perhaps the lines between his own psyche and Hannibal’s have blurred so thickly he views everyone else as inferior, in which case Frederick’s quite glad to have been turned down. He leaves the flowers anyway. Hopes he’s allergic to part of the bouquet.  
  
Alana’s a colleague, a fellow psychiatrist he couldn’t help but admire in a slightly mocking manner. Too soft on patients, not cunning enough to win secrets from them in a game of mental chess.  
She’s been cold hostile iron towards him since Gideon, a dislike not even his old patient could summon in her directed towards him every time they lock eyes. She denies his help with an oddly triumphant smile. Martyr. Perhaps she’s still too in love with Hannibal Lecter to aid him in bringing the man down.  
He leaves the flowers with a small, slightly sarcastic prayer that they won’t be lillies next time as he walks away.  
  
He doesn’t mention lillies to Jack when he visits. The indomitable Bella Crawford’s apparently taken a turn for the worst, he’s told through slighty snarling teeth, and he should leave so they can spend their final moments.  
He should have brought two sets, or at least left this one, he shuffles the ribbon holding them together, an uncharacteristically obvious display of anxiety in his hands.  
  
He’s not discussing what happens at the Verger home. Represses it determinedly. Reapplies makeup and latex to the face that at least he still has, stabbing setting powder onto his face like it will harm the bastard who forced him to strip with each jab of bristles on still-sore skin. Sits in his car and watches Alana Bloom still pretty still perfect being invited in with open arms through a stable gate.  
Allies.  
  
He’s got his trademark. He’s got Freddie Lounds, his strange blood-bound comrade in arms who he wouldn’t trust as far as he could throw if they weren’t working towards a common goal. Hannibal’s capture, and the career defining fame that would bring. Her website, his money, $250 dollars per reliable hint to the other man’s whereabouts.  
He’s curious to see which of their little ‘scarred man with ruthless female’ teams will catch Hannibal’s scent first.


	5. A Creeping Sense Of Unease

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Perhaps Frederick Chilton's heating isn't really malfunctioning after all.

Something’s followed Frederick home.  
  
He can feel it.  
He ignores it at first. Hasn’t been religious since he was seventeen, has been a psychiatrist for the larger part of his life. He’s been through hellish facial and psychological trauma, the misplacement of objects and far worse lingering, creeping paranoia that he feels entering some rooms of his house is probably just a neurological side effect of long painful weeks being monitored in hospital wards.  
  
Something’s followed Frederick home.  
  
The pens and papers- and a cup of tea that startles him awake one particularly frightening night- that fall on the floor must have just been left too close to the edge of his desk, he justifies to himself. That and his depth perception’s a little odd now he’s only got one working eye. Some rooms are colder than others, but blasting the heating solves that problem most of the time.  
  
Something’s followed Frederick home.  
  
The cold’s not a normal cold, he realises after around a week. It seems to roll like a non-existant fog from doorways, creep up his legs like a hand stroking up his shin. Conveniently absent when he hires a contractor to look for the source of the draft. Strong enough to distract him from reading books some days. He loses three glasses in a weekend, found later in rooms he can’t remember going into.  
  
Something’s followed Frederick home.  
  
Whatever it is that’s disturbing his nights and unsettling him in his waking moments, he realises with an uncomfortable adrenaline clench of his remaining stomach, is not earthly.  
Frederick sits, shifting his feet slightly as they cool, and putting down his crossword exhasperatedly as he works out whether or not to go and put on a pair of socks, prevent the cold biting at his exposed extremities.  
  
That’s when he notices it.  
The glass of Scotch, large and full of the healing ambrosia his torn nerves require, slowly shifts on his desk.  
  
It pauses for a moment. He’s not sure if he even saw it move, he’s not sleeping well, it could have been a trick of the light.  
The glass moves again.  
It falls forward, hits him in the crotch without his hands reacting to cover himself and spills its cold liquid straight into his lap. He jolts upright with a blend of pain and shock _it is not a hallucination_  and backs away from his desk, only really panicking as his back hits the wall behind him with a dull thud. The cold laces a little further up now, moving up to seemingly lace around his elbows, an icy caress that he runs through, smashing his hip off a table and stumbling to the floor as he leaves the room, adrenaline causing his fingers to fumble frantically with the door on his way out.  
He saw it.  
It was real.  
Frederick slams into his bedroom, his inner sanctum, and stammers a terrified plea of protection from the ghost- the thing- downstairs, the first prayer he’s made in decades.  
  
Something’s followed Frederick home.  
  
He knows who it is, the only person it could possibly be. And he knows he- it- is only growing stronger, feeding on the resentment he left over in life, a bottomless well Frederick’s terrified of the consequences of the man tapping.  
Abel’s ghost.  
Frederick stays in his bedroom all day the next day, looking up the numbers for exorcists and debating whether or not he’s convinced enough to phone them.  
It’s a ridiculous idea.  
  
Someone’s followed Frederick home.   
  
Going down to his cellar alone is a worse one.  
  
He decides to do it himself, partially bravery, mostly because he’s too proud to be known as that one pathetic psychiatrist who superstitiously called the Ghostbusters on a draft.  
It’s not a draft.  
It’s icy down here at the lowest point of his home, to the point it feels unnervingly like dead fingers stroking the lining of his lungs with each frigid breath. The goosebumps on his arms prove something is wrong, the thermometer for his wine’s slow beeped warning proof that this is not happening in his head.  
The psychic sites he visited hopefully recommend a beginner’s ritual for ghosts involving salt and a candle, so he does both, lights the little tealight on the floor where he’s kneeling and surrounds himself with a kilogram of salt. “A-Abel?” His voice cracks poorly, a small weak sound he has to clear his throat to try and improve. “Doctor Gideon?” He tries again, ignoring thoughts of a metal gurney with a corpse on it filling the middle of the room as the candle in front of him shifts at the name.  
  
And then abruptly, causing Frederick to hitch a breath, the candle snuffs out.  
  
The light overhead’s on, casting enough light for him to watch, throat closing, as with a soft shush of scratching on tiles, the salt circle warps, something large and blunt and invisible pushing past it towards him, coming for him _Jesus no no no no no líbranos malo_ , he’s running, panickedly throwing himself against the cellar door to lock it from the outside, sprinting upstairs and trying frantically to calm his breathing as the cold finally sweeps away from his feet with the slam of his bedroom door.  
He’s being haunted, and his ritual didn’t work. The panic that thought forces into his chest makes him grab his laptop, book a room in a motel many times lower than his normal price range as he debates, terrified whether poltergeist, ghost Abel, whatever horror his old patient is will let him leave.  
Check in time from 9AM tomorrow, the voice on the phone smiles. No negotiations.  
Frederick’s here for the night.  
The thought’s such a punch to the guts he still has that his breathing calms. He’s probably a little in shock, something he’s sure the man downstairs could tell him properly if he could talk.  
He will stay up all night then. Cover the floor nearest his door in salt and wait. It mightn’t do much, but it’s a warning system if somehow the ghoul manages to break through the door.  
  
After an hour of tense silence, Frederick puts music on.  
A bad idea, which apparently calms his mind enough to sleep.   
  
He wakes with a weight on his feet.  
Frederick doesn’t breathe. Plays dead. Pretends to be asleep, Gideon’s a monster under his bed, harmless, the weight slowly moving, crawling slug-like up his trembling body from ankles to knees and moving past his adrenaline-pricked crotch can’t see him- ribs now, a heavy crush that makes him whimper- if Frederick doesn’t look.  
  
His logic holds. Abel rolls off him unexpectedly, causing a dip and creaked springs in the mattress net to him.  
He’s not going to look.  
He’s not going to look.  
He’s dead if he does.  
  
He’s dead anyway, probably.  
  
It takes twenty minutes for him to build up enough courage to open his one good eye, force it to slowly roll over to the pillow and see shapes. Colours.  
A torso. Not much else. Grey boxers, not prison issue. Maybe Hannibal’s. Blue eyes, the same ones that haunt him, paler blue lips that curl into a mirthless smirk.  
A darkly smiling ghost, still very much alive as he leans in a little further, rolling what’s left of his torso in a closer until he’s far too close to Frederick’s shaking form, icy eyes burning in to his face.  
  
“Boo.”


	6. A Rather Unconventional Job Interview

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: Mason Verger. He mentions things about his past canon acts, if you're uncomfortable with them, please don't read! <3

Mason Verger- Alana, to her credit  _had_ forewarned him- is an adversary so formidable, Frederick is beginning to regret his decision to try and recruit him as an ally.  
The man’s a ghoul, a monster as twisted in mind, apparently, as- he’s not going to call whatever remaining skin’s still stretched over nearly-visible bone a face- he seems in ever-wasting body. His last statement hardly disproves that theory:  
”Take it off.”  
”Whu-” Frederick stops. Winces. Takes a moment to force himself to adjust to stop his tongue noticably flopping around the still-frightening gap in his face. “What was that, Mr Verger?”  
The man’s not serious. Frederick’s not a stripper-gram, he’s already removed most of half of his own face-  
“You heard me. Take. It. Off.” Blood hasn’t flooded his face this noticably since the bullet, a thought that pauses his hands and causes a familiar rising nausea to swirl in his stomach. “If I’m gonna hire you as a psychiatrist, I’m gonna want to hear your old patients’ reviews, and as Doctor Gideon’s probably still rotting in an evidence locker…”  
Frederick can’t.  
The scar’s still an upsetting embarrasment, a permanently flushed line splitting his stomach with far too many nightmares attached. He’s cradling it now, the same way he did when his small intestine’s remainder was poking out of it, holding himself together as he avoids the stare he can feel eagerly burning into his face.  
  
Except he can.  
He’s new Frederick now. Admits that the only reason this one hurts is because it’s entirely his fault. Makes peace with the fact and ignores the hollow attempt at a whistle Mason forces through missing lips as he undoes the buttons with forced steady hands.  
  
“That must have been  _traumatic_.” Verger’s enjoying that fact fact too much, and Frederick’s as disgusted with the man as he with himself. He shouldn’t feel strangely liberated by standing half naked for the first time in six months in front of a known killer. But he does.  
He accepts that. He’s Frederick noveua now. Fearless.  
“And I’m perfectly aware that I deserved that. For unethical psychiatric practices.” It’s a ‘no’ to their arrangement. He doesn’t want to be Mason Verger’s sniffer dog- the man’s looking for a psychiatrist as much as he’s looking for someone to give him a facial- and he’s stopping this now as he buttons his shirt again.  
“Raised Catholic, weren’t you, Doctor Chilton?” Frederick pauses on the bottom button. He’s a rabbit in headlights, fearing the knowledge he’s already exposed too much. “Catholic schoolboys. Always so willing to accept pain and mutilation.”  
No.  
Frederick buttons his shirt again, rapidly, with tremoring hands and hate in the seat of his stomach. He’s stopping now, answering no more questions, however tempting it might be to snap a reply.  
“Or are you just a masochist, Dr Chilton?”  
Sometimes. Four buttons to go.  
“How unethical did you  _get_  with Doctor Gideon?”  
Very. Three buttons to go.  
“Was he your dom? Did you use a safeword, or was it a big ol’ roleplay gone horribly wrong?”  
Not at all. A mutilation. Two, now one button to go.  
“Were you circumcised as a child, Frederick? I can guess you were quite a pretty one.”  
He’s got to reply to this one, his mouth won’t let him let this chance go by.  
“No. But I can imagine it must be quite traumatic to lose all the skin from the head.” He pauses a moment, savours the look of shock he could be imagining on Mason’s foul face. “I have another appointment, Mr Verger, but this has been delightful. You have my card.”  
  
Mason does have his card. Knows where he lives, has killed people before. So Frederick shouldn’t take canapes from his kitchen table, leer openly at his pretty sister ( _very_  non-identical twins) on his way out.  
But he does. Gets into his new car, drives home.  
Takes the longest, most satisfying shower of his life to wipe the lasting slime off him.  
Uncurls himself from his towel cocoon after, stares at his scar, healed and less pink, and decides he’s reborn. If vengence involves Mason Verger, vengence can wait.


	7. Sound And Vision

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frederick reflects on a synesthetic childhood and recovers from a gunshot.

Frederick’s childhood is full of light. Literally. He speaks and hears in colours, a shy child who spends too long lost amongst the greens and golds of his parent’s voices to pay any attention to what they’re actually saying. It’s a peaceful childhood, spent buried in books he prides himself on being able to read even if he doesn’t truly understand.

His trips to counsellors and neurologists start when his first teachers complain at six. He’s tested for ADHD, deafness, bullying, any probable causes or labels that could be stuck on a child who stares off blankly into space when talked to. Frederick tests negative for all of them, and pays attention to his teachers once he’s read all the comics in the doctor’s waiting room.  
He doesn’t think to bring up the colours. He’s always assumed everyone could see them, and his young mind doesn’t want to consider the alternative- that there’s something wrong with him.

He learns to avoid the cafeteria and any major sports events in high school after his first day spent clutching his eyes and sobbing in a toilet. Migranes get him more trips, scans as well this time, and shaky diagnosis of light sensitivity involving indoor sunglasses as treatment. Apparently his proclamation that he’d rather die was a little melodramatic, but his mother accepts it and doesn’t make him wear them. Concern at the thought of one day being forced to walk into class looking like a blind man makes him go a little further and subtly drop them behind a radiator with a remarkably satisfying purple clang. They’re never spoken of again.

Clarity and a reasonable explanation come at 23, when he’s blankly scrolling Wikipedia, hangover refusing to let him do anything productive with his day. ‘Synesthesia’ is the name of his apparent disorder, projective type, he’s strangely excited to diagnose himself with. It’s Chromesthesia by the time he’s halfway down the article, the association of sound and vision, the reason he-  
There’s a reason for it. Frederick could almost cry with relief.

He’s mastered it by thirty five, and now allows himself to feel an extra wave of smugness whenever he singles out the link between colour and a person’s voice. His secretary’s is red, Alana’s an odd off-mustard. He dislikes Alana’s almost as much as he dislikes Jack Crawford’s, which doesn’t even have a specific colour unless it’s quiet. When it’s loud, it’s an indescribable horrific colour he can only label ‘migrane’. He tends to avoid Jack.  
He’s oddly disappointed by the fact Will Graham’s is brown, having heard so much about the man’s potentially synthetic traits. (He’s never figured out his own to compare it to, but he firmly believes it to be a wonderful one.)  
  
He’s got other patients he’d much rather listen to. Abel Gideon’s voice is a good colour, blue like his eyes but darker. It’s sharp now, like the scalpel in his hands, and it should be red, because everything at the moment is red, his stomach is red and open and it’s both of their faults, he shouldn’t have done this but he doesn’t deserve to die. At least the slap of his organs in the bowl’s not overpoweringly loud. Frederick’s so out of it by the time the ambulance gets there that he can see the movements of the bag over his mouth, little white flutterings of breath that are determined to send him to sleep. The heart monitor in the ambulance is green and sharp, a stab behind his eyes with each beep, but he’s alive.

Hannibal Lecter’s voice is a rich, deep maroon, accented heavily. He trusted that voice. And Alana still will trust that voice, he struggles violently. He will run, because he will not be believed.

Frederick doesn’t know what colour the bullet that shatters his skull is.  
It happened too fast to hear it, which is good, because he’d rather not throw any more colours out of his wardrobe. He plans to burn the checked blazers when he gets home.  
If he gets home. He’s lost muscle mass from an induced coma, so he’s being monitored on that front which means he’d better get used to his private ward.

It’s three weeks after he starts his exercise regime when they unwire his jaw. He’s scared of it, scared to move it in case something goes wrong and the aluminium pins holding his top one together undo themselves. He’s also scared to speak. He’ll know what he sounds like, in the privacy of the ward, talking to himself, and he doesn’t want to sound different.

He does sound different, a weak, grey rasp that more or less manages to form the proper shapes for words when his mother finally arrives. Darker, more tainted somehow. How symbolic, he smiles darkly to himself, remembering the mess under his facial bandage. And then she’s holding him, asking a hundred questions in a rush of warm gold and warmer arms, and she doesn’t seem to have noticed the change or mind when he cries into her shoulder.   
Hannibal hasn’t changed that. But he will change Hannibal, store him in the end cell where Gideon used to lean on the bars, replace blue with red.  
The air hums with steel-grey purpose as he settles himself off to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title's a very very obvious Bowie reference, but the 2013 version fits this beautifully!


End file.
